


Headcanon Backstories

by AltoidMint (InsomniacCyanide)



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, PTSD, Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-11-18 09:43:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11288670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsomniacCyanide/pseuds/AltoidMint
Summary: Sometimes character's biographies are left a bit too vague for me. I take some artistic liberties with that and hope you enjoy it.Please take caution. A lot of bad stuff is referenced in these.1. Celestia Ludenberg (Taeko Yasuhiro)2. Sayaka Maizono3. Natsumi Kuzuryuu4. Sato5. Mukuro Ikusaba6. ?





	1. Celestia Ludenberg

Celestia Ludenberg knew more than anyone how short time was. She knew it like the back of her bony hand, with the knuckles jutting out and looking so much more pale than the rest of her, and with the veins tracing maps beneath her skin. She knew how little time she had, even if it weren’t for the killing game, she’d known for years that her time on this earth had been very limited. 

 

She was never sickly, no, she barely got sick at all, in fact. Her luck kept her away from such things, unless of course she wanted to get sick, then it would help her out. It was dependable. It was chaotic. It was wholly unreliable. 

 

She’d known for years that she would die, though she did not know it’d be by such a common manner, the sound of a fire truck had always made her flinch. She had never known why. She had always hated flames any larger than the flicker of a candle. She never knew why. 

 

Well now she knew. She knew exactly why as she stood under the intense heat of the flames at her feet, keeping her hands clasped tightly in front of her face to give herself strength for the just execution she is receiving. How conceited of her to think that she would get such a glorious death, a death fitting of Celestia Ludenberg. 

 

But she was never Celestia Ludenberg. 

 

She was Taeko Yasuhiro. 

 

And Taeko Yasuhiro died in a car crash by a fire truck slamming her into the dirt. 

 

A common and boring death for a common and boring girl. 

 

Taeko remembers the crisp smell of paper burning, and how the smoke had simply smelled nice to her instead of scorching her insides like the smoke from the stake did. She remembers the way her mother had burned paper with matches instead of smoking cigarettes to breathe in the smoke. Taeko had never known exactly why her mother had done that. Perhaps a precaution against the tars and waste put in brand name cigarettes, or perhaps saving on money. Either way, her mother had always smelled of smoke. But never of cigarette smoke, oh no, only of ashes from paper and matches. With one match a piece of paper could burn for a while, and if one put many pieces of paper on top of it, they’d also catch fire. 

 

Taeko’s taken back to those days, sitting on the high chairs lined up against the island counter, watching her mother burn pieces of paper in a decorative porcelain dish with fading green, blue, and pink pictures of country roads and floral motifs. Taeko had always curled her lip up at the scent, and the sight of the flames had made her intrinsically and instinctively uncomfortable. Ichika, her younger sister, would wail when she smelled the paper burning, and Taeko would always get annoyed with her. 

 

Because when her mother was breathing in the smoke of the paper in the kitchen, that was when Taeko could sneak in, just to see her in her most natural state. She endured the smell and the uncomfortable feelings from the fire just to quietly gaze into that far away look her mother exuded in her lonesome. Because her mother was her mother everywhere else, Mrs. Yasuhiro, with a wry smile and wisdom galore to spread through her fingertips and words. Mrs. Yasuhiro, running around for her two young daughters and catering to her husband’s needs. Mrs. Yasuhiro, as she tried endlessly to type out another chapter of a forever unfinished book as her family screamed and hollered and distracted around her. Taeko would notice much later how she had always grit her teeth, grinding the top and bottom down together, while the rest of her stayed firmly in place, deep blue ocean eyes sharp.

 

That was a big part of Taeko’s life. Her mother’s ocean eyes. Taeko had decided that her mother had ocean eyes when she was nine years old. She had seen the paper burning enough times to know that somewhere deep within the dark blue depths of her mother’s eyes there lay someone who had long since been buried underneath the weight of family life and unimaginable responsibilities put on someone so young and endless. 

 

Taeko had come to that conclusion when her mother’s birthday had rolled around, marking the day the woman had turned 26, and her parents had broke out the champagne saved for occasions like this.Taeko’s father drank himself stupid, laughing at everything, shouting at this and that, acting fun and funny but so pushy. When he had passed out in his room, Mrs. Yasuhiro finally could drop that act, because she never noticed the curious piercing gaze of a soon to be ten year old. The only thing Mrs. Yasuhiro seemed to see was somewhere out there in the world, and as she stared at the way the moonlight hit the kitchen tile and shimmered and shone like the water on the beaches she used to walk on yet be disgusted by, like the shimmer of a spoon dropped to the floor catching the light just right, like hair freshly washed. Mrs. Yasuhiro waxed poems in her skull, built up walls of words, spinning around the concave concert of her head and fluttering like the flecks of plastic or glitter in a snowglobe, settling at the bottom and weighing like a stone. It was torture, because the words were right there, the way they sounded, felt,  _ clung _ to her. But she’d never be able to get those words back from where they had left her. No one could. 

 

Taeko didn’t miss the endlessness in her mother’s eyes that night, nor did she miss the glassy glazed over emptiness Mrs. Yasuhiro toted the next day. Taeko never missed when she was wearing the mask of a mother, putting all of her feelings into a box and throwing that box into a landfill of things that Taeko will never be able to puzzle out about her mother. Taeko would never get to know who Akiha Higashi was, how her ocean eyes held so much knowledge at so young. She’d only ever know Mrs. Akiha Yasuhiro, her mother, a woman with glassy dark blue eyes and a soft round face that was framed by the deepest darkest brown hair that fell in shimmering ever-changing waves. Taeko would only ever know the young mother who had her first child at sixteen and married into the family of a man who was thirteen years older than her. Taeko would never be able to interrogate her on why. 

 

Taeko grew up yearning for her mother’s ocean eyes. She wanted that depth, the endlessness, that infinite reach her mother’s eyes possessed in those still moments in between the mother mask. She envied Ichika for having inherited them, those beautiful eyes, along with the soft yet strong figure from her mother. Taeko herself had taken to her father’s genes, with a tall skinny frame, narrow and flat, with the dullest brown eyes she had ever seen. She hated her father’s eyes, and she hated him for giving them to her. She hated how they looked, with not a single fleck of gold or red or green or blue or anything. Anything would be better than the flat empty brown she got. Brown eyes weren’t bad, because for most people there’s something to them. It’s either flecks of gold, or rings of gold, or something glowing within them that gives them a certain light, or it's a deep darkness, a shadow across the top, perhaps blending in with the iris in certain lighting. A look. A personality. 

 

Taeko found neither in her eyes. Stark dark brown, with no flecks of gold, but the brown wasn’t dark enough to be alluring, just boring. She would stare at them for hours in the mirror. Endlessly, tirelessly boring. 

 

Ichika’s eyes held the color of her mother’s eyes, but had that childish light to it that made Taeko always so angry. She doesn’t know why she hated her sister that much, but perhaps it was the way she forced herself to grow up quickly, and the way her mother had encouraged it, to keep her out of her way, and the way Ichika simply hadn’t done the same. Taeko and Ichika had always been in the way of their mother. From birth to death they had held her back, forced her to become a wife and mother, forced her to stop being herself and start being an image of someone who could live a domestic life. 

 

Ichika was naive and always fell for her mother’s forced smiles, but Taeko never did. She’d stand and study her mother’s face, and her mother would stare back in a silent challenge. Taeko always backed down and let her win. Even if there wasn’t a threat, it was still terrifying to see a flash of anger flicker like a flame inside of her. It was scarier than anything Taeko saw in the real fire in the decorative dishes. 

 

Eventually Taeko would make Ichika shut up if she started crying at the smell of smoke, either a punch or a hand on her mouth would do, and Ichika would shut her loud mouth. Taeko would be satisfied with her shut up, but it came with the sacrifice of never seeing the depths her mother’s eyes could procure up close. Taeko soon learned to lock her in the linen closet, where her cries couldn’t be heard, which finally allowed her to view her mother’s ocean eyes for as long as she could. 

 

Ichika eventually grew to be quiet, and Taeko regret making her so afraid of her, because the poor girl went from crying when she was hurt, to shutting herself up and bearing it. Taeko turned her into a little pudgy soldier, and it made Taeko feel as though she’d robbed her of the childhood she herself hadn’t wanted. Ichika never wanted to grow up. Ever. She didn’t want to be an adult or have any responsibilities, and Taeko shouldn’t have faulted her for that. 

 

But she did. And she couldn’t take back those years of torment that drove Ichika to be as quiet as she was. Taeko had never been close to Ichika herself. Sure, they were sisters, and they both had the deep black hair their mother had, but that was about where their similarities ended. Ichika was soft and small and pudgy. She had never much enjoyed watching people, and instead favored doing things. Often in their younger years she would pester Taeko to play with her, to do stuff, to kick things around. Taeko had never agreed and would shout at her often. Sometimes she’d agree to kick things around, only to turn and kick Ichika herself. Ichika, to her credit, learned quickly to stay away. The yearning for contact never left her though, as she would grow to continue to seek out Taeko and her mother continuously over the years. Both refused, leaving Ichika starved for contact and comfort, and their father’s lack of a presence in the household only fueled this. 

 

Ichika’s classmates often complained about how touchy-feely she was, or how incessantly she talked. She spoke far too often for them, because no one could tell her to stop when she was in class. Her teacher found her a bright young woman, with a sharp mind and a literary talent like no other. Her teacher let her speak, let her ramble, let her shout and be the child that she was, and Ichika could never thank her enough for it. But from the moment she stepped foot into the second-floor apartment, the prison of her home, her mouth would be sewn shut again. 

 

Taeko regret making her silent. She regret not being able to use her to understand her mother better. She regret not speaking with her. They were both intelligent. Highly so, and often times after the events that lead her to become Celestia Ludenberg passed, she would imagine the ways she could have spoken to Ichika. The ways she would have apologized. 

 

But she hadn’t. 

 

Together, the three women of the Yasuhiro household would grow in the cramped confines of their second floor prison. They grew rapidly. Each of them their own brand of Kudzu, eating up their areas and reacting violently to the roots that trespassed. Normally it was Ichika who would trespass, and back off near immediately, her soft big eyes screaming with grief as she was chased away again and again. Sometimes, it’d be Taeko and her mother. Those were always the most violent. No physical altercations ever transpired, but the words they flung, the language they used, and the emotional toll it took on everyone was palpable. It made things so much harder. Taeko had to be sneaky if she wanted to look into those ocean eyes now, as what mainly caused those intense fallouts were her, staring into the soul of her mother, as she watched the flame dance.    
  


It was when she was eleven that Taeko realized that the paper pages her mother burnt were unseen tomes of her mother’s mind. Her mother was a literary genius, and a prolific author. She was a prodigy, and even in her youth her published works were more than anyone could fully wrap their heads around. Taeko would look at the words going up in smoke in horror, as Akiha burnt the starting pages of a new novel (Always yet to be! Always postponed!) promised to her readers years before. Many years before. Before her. Before Taeko. The guilt would weigh on her like a stone, as she watched her mother burn little pieces of her heart and soul through the pages, breathing in the smoke to rejuvenate herself, and then return to typing up another beginning and start the cycle all over again. Sometimes it would only take a day for her to burn paper. Sometimes a week. Maybe more. Once it took a whole month and a half for her to burn paper, and that had been the most painful thing to witness. Half a book, typed tirelessly for a month and half, used as an excuse for why she and Ichika had to eat the frozen pizza again, all gone. Every last word lost to the smoke and ash. 

 

Taeko would learn to leave the house at twelve. She’d learned of what her father did daily. She learned of their ties to certain yakuza families. She knew her father was a hard worker for them. She would inform Ichika of it, smirking as the chubby girl would shake with fear and uncertainty. She was so cruel. She would never let Ichika tag along. Their roots kept growing. 

 

She’d make friends with the neighborhood cats, feeding them and such. Her favorite was the fattest little kitten she’d ever seen. He’d crawled out of a dumpster and sat on her foot like a throne. She loved him. But she wouldn’t give him a name. She’d grow too attached if she did. She’d skip around the grimy looming buildings of the city, standing on cinderblocks to shout at pigeons and then cackle as they took off. She’d find a place to earn money. They knew her father, and the stuff he did, and she didn’t mind one bit when they sat her down at a table and taught her how to play cards. She always had impeccable luck. And she would always win, strategy or not. 

She would grin a tooth grin when she got her earnings, and the men at her table learned to bet small. She would laugh and joke with them, as if she’d known them for years. 

 

She felt she belonged at the gambling table. The green felt called to her. She liked the feel of money. It was a comfort. She’d go out and buy herself real food. She’d eat real food! Not frozen pizza! Her favorite, one of the first and cheapest places she had went to, was gyoza. The fancy dishes from elsewhere just couldn’t compare, no matter how hard they tried. Perhaps it was the feeling of freedom tied to the common dish that stuck out to her. She never knew. She never cared. 

 

Her mother’s mental state only got worse. The woman was deteriorating at an exponential rate, her life spiraling down. The paper burnings would happen everyday. Ichika would wail in her room, and Taeko would glare through her thin wall. But her mother didn’t stop this time. Ichika wasn’t a toddler anymore. She didn’t have to stop. She’d only stop before their father came home, late at night, when things got dark and quiet. And through the walls Taeko could hear them argue. Her father would complain about the way that the apartment smelled like smoke, and how dangerous it was to unscrew and unplug all the smoke alarms. What if the place caught fire? How would they know? 

Her mother would say that it didn’t matter, and then things would get quiet. 

 

Taeko hated classic literature. She hated lengthy words. Not because she really did, no, she had the literary mind herself. She hated it because it destroyed her mother’s life. She didn’t want it to destroy her own as well. She hated the phrases and paragraphs and the sentence formations. Instead, she indulged herself in graphic novels. Manga of all shapes and sorts. She grew an appreciation for the art form. It was entertaining in a more visual format and felt less stiff. It was fluid. It relied on emotion and legitimate show-don't-tell tactics. It was a relief to just see how people were feeling instead of reading about it in excruciating detail. How boring, right?

 

She was mainly drawn to stories involving gambling of course, and even as Celestia she would always find the time to pick up a copy of a newer edition. She couldn’t help herself. They would fill her mind and distract from the paper burnings that she could smell through the apartment. Things kept getting worse. She couldn’t help but indulge in the entertaining stories of impossible things. 

 

But then, the paper burnings stopped. Aburuptly. 

 

Ichika was more anxious than usual, and as summer drew to a close, her mother was incredibly pleasant. It was scary, and the stretched fake smiles of her mother that never left her face, the endlessness never allowed to be let out, creating a simmering tension all throughout their home. Taeko would spend her days out on the town. Ichika would spend her days inside. 

 

Eventually school started up again, and Taeko when to middleschool. Ichika went to school. And then cram school. Taeko would wait for her outside, her circle of friends, small as it was, trickling away until it was just her, waiting for Ichika’s cram school to end. And then it would. And she would harass her all the way home. 

 

Things felt off as they returned home, and they felt the air pressure change as they trudged up the stairs. Ichika began to shake, sweating, shivering, tears bubbling up at the corners of her eyes, as if the oceans in her eyes were bleeding. Taeko found it disgusting, and dragged her harshly up the steps, down the hall. Ichika wrenched herself violently away, and leaned her back up against the other side of the hall, stuttering about how things didn’t feel right, how it was wrong, how something had to be wrong. Taeko would sneer, turn, and open the door-

 

Only to find her mother, hanging by her neck, a twisted grin on her beautiful youthful face as her body spun slowly. 

 

Taeko drank in the image. She couldn’t look away. She didn’t care for Ichika’s loud and anguished cry as she saw what was inside. She didn’t care as Ichika ran away like she always did. She couldn’t care about that at all. Not when she was staring into her mother’s ocean eyes. Not when she was moving on autopilot, unable to cry as always, numb through and through. Her pale hand with the knuckles jutting out and the maps of veins beneath would reach out, and gently grab the note under her mother’s feet. 

 

She would read the beautiful script, the swirling characters that formed the most beautiful of sentence, the most beautiful of books, of novels. She would read the one piece of writing since Taeko’s birth, that her mother hadn’t burnt. 

 

_ ‘I was so close to being finished. If I could do it all over again I never would have had children. I hate you. I hate all three of you.’ _

 

And that was it. 

 

Taeko folded the piece of paper, the pounding in her ears would only grow louder. She tucked the piece of paper into her pocket. She couldn’t let Ichika read this. Despite her cruelty, this was too much. She stands in the doorway of the apartment for a moment, considering her options. She could stay. She could deal with all of this. She could stick around with annoying crying Ichika. 

 

Or she could leave. 

 

And leave she did. 

 

She’d stopped by her favorite alley on the way out, picking up her favorite fat kitten that would sit on her foot like it was a throne, to go to her favorite place to eat and calmly swallow her favorite food of gyoza. She would pass by her favorite place to play cards, and bought herself a train ticket. She was whisked away by the noises before the sirens and her father would reach her home. 

 

From then on she was Celestia Ludenberg. 

 

 

Years later, during her time at Hopes Peak, she would learn of the rest of her family’s fates. She’d known long ago that her father had died in a scuffle between a rival gang. Fifty dead. She would receive a call up to the office, and the headmaster passed her the phone. Her face was steely as always.    
  
“You’re Taeko Yasuhiro, right? Your uhm… your sister she uh…” The man on the phone would stutter, trying to find the right way to word things. Normally Taeko’s tongue was sharp and cruel, and he would not be spared. But she knew. She’d saw it coming the day she saw those ocean eyes. Their roots would stop growing. Every one of them was doomed in this way.

 

“Killed herself?” She finishes for him, leaning against the headmaster’s desk casually as he sent her a concerned look.    
  


“Yes.” The man over the phone pauses. “She threw herself off of a building about two months ago. We didn’t know how to contact you. We have her things. Is there anything you would want?” 

 

“Just the note.” Her voice was icy. 

 

“What?”

 

“Just the note.” She repeated. Slower. Firmer. 

 

“Alright.” 

 

The conversation soon came to a close following that. She would return to class with a new-found silence that echoed through her skull. Her ears pounded. She would stare in silence and become completely unresponsive, but of course she would keep her poker faced smile on, to quell comments. She could vaguely hear her own class’s literary prodigy, seething about something or other, and she would close her eyes and sigh.

 

She kept those notes with her forever, the reasons, the words. She hated them, but she loved to keep them. She loved to remember sometimes. Even if it hurt. . Ichika’s was a far cry from her mother’s note, angry and aggressive and cruel and bitter. Ichika’s wasn’t even close. It was simple. And staring at it, reading the beautiful scrawling script alone in her dorm room mere days later after the phone call. 

 

_ ‘I’m sorry Taeko. I still love you.’ _

 

It made Taeko’s heartache. 

 

For the first time in years, since forever it felt, Taeko cried. 

 

 

 

 

 

And then, like paper, she was up in flames. 


	2. Sayaka Maizono

Sayaka’s hands are shaky as she dips her finger into her own wound. The letters are drawn awkwardly, and her wrist is bent in a near painful angle. But of course she pushes through. He won’t get the satisfaction of knowing he killed and got away with it. She grits her teeth, the knife in her stomach making things all the more excruciating. She powers on, hand eventually falling to her side as her breaths begin to thin and slow. She doesn’t remember when she slid her eyes shut, trying to focus on just the spite. Trying to focus on just how damn angry she was.  

 

She doesn’t die knowing she had lived a good life. She dies furious, and trapped, and frustrated with her failure. He had been such an easy target. She probably should’ve foreseen him trying to fight back. She should’ve known he’d choose fight over flight. But it had slipped her mind. Nothing was more important than getting out. Nothing was more important than getting the life she worked so hard for back. She wanted it back! She wanted to be on stage again, she wanted to feel the lights and hear the cheers and the way the speakers blew the music out loud behind her. Not because she liked it. In actuality, she hated every moment of it. She hated the eyes that probed her every move, she hated the sheen of sweat down her back, she hated the way she had to work harder and harder every performance to stay ahead of the rest of the group. Any minor slip up, and she would lose her privileges, or her fans. She needed those fans. She needed them to buy merchandise. She needed them to love her. 

 

She loved it when people loved her. 

 

She loved their undying devotion to an idol. To an idea of what she could be. She loved it when they assumed. It made things easier. When they think they can impress her with their extensive “knowledge” about her, she smiles, politely, and agrees, and lets them think whatever they want. It was so easy.

 

It was a relief at first to be stuck in Hopes Peak. She had needed a break. She had needed some form of rest from the idol world. It was tiring. She had to train her waist in various unsafe methods to keep the perfect figure. She had to exercise daily to keep the shape she had when she started. She had to sneak snacks in, because if her manager caught her eating anymore than what he had told her to, there would be unimaginable consequences. She didn’t allow herself to think of anything except the walls of the school. She willed herself not to relive the pain that she grit her teeth through when she twisted her ankle on-stage, yet couldn’t dare allow herself to show the pain she was in, or even think of stopping the performance. Sayaka hadn’t dared to allow herself to think of the world outside too much. She initially hadn’t even wanted to leave. It was nice to pretend for a much smaller, and much more predictable audience. 

 

But then she began thinking of the effect it would have on her career, and she began to waver. 

 

There were countless things she had done in the name of becoming an idol. She had done terrible awful things to achieve her dream. She kept everything under a veil of kindness. She had a mask. And then another mask. Everything was a show she put on. She had long since forgotten how her real personality was. She had long since forgotten who she was. 

 

She supposes that there was a time where she was truly herself, instead of a bitter desperate husk of a person trying to claw her way to the top and stay there in a vicious attempt to never lose relevance. She’d start scandal after scandal, and always give the expected input towards other scandals, and follow her manager’s advice to a T. She was tied to her contract in blood and bone.

 

Back when she was younger she thought this would have been the dream. Back when she was young and unafraid and unaware of the horror the world could produce on such a large scale. Back when she was just a lonely child watching snowy television programs about performances. Back when she was just a child who enjoyed music class. Back when her meals were microwavable popcorn and a diet sprite she stole from the teacher’s lounge. 

 

She can’t help but miss those days of ignorance. Those days of crippling loneliness as her father ran out of funds to have a babysitter take care of her, and left her by her lonesome. He worked hard. He kept a roof over her head. She remembers the way his hands shook, the way his eyes looked so tired, and the way he seemed not to sleep, but pass out from exhaustion at the end of the day. She didn’t watch him often. Only on the weekends, when she would dare to stay up as late as she could to watch him come home. It always varied. Sometimes it was only 3 A.M. Those were when she got lucky. She’d rush down the stairs after seeing his car pull up in the driveway, to make him something to eat, to hold a conversation with him before he went to bed and passed out in his space. He was a pleasant man. Tired and worn down. He spoke softly, thoughtfully, with a rasp to it. She’d loved him with all her heart. 

 

But most of the time he came home at five to seven in the morning, long after she had fallen asleep, curled up on the sofa, snowy television playing a background to her elementary school woes. When he’d pick her up gently and set her down upstairs, and shut her door on his way out. When she’d wake up mid-day with him already gone, and her in her bed, crying her eyes out as she missed him again. She never got to see enough of him. She never got to know him at all. She only had vague conversations with him while he ate the spaghetti she made him, and smiled even though she had found a way to burn the noodles. 

 

When she started on the road to becoming an idol at age ten, she became busy. She would go out for days, trying to outsource and become what she had dreamed of being. She would become an idol no matter what. Even if she got hurt a lot. Even if the way people stared at her made her itch under her skin. Even if it took away the little time she could spend with her father. She missed him. She really did. But she felt the bitterness overtake her every time she thought about it. She felt the resentment grow as she met new people, people who wouldn’t leave her alone for days. People who’d stay by her side, for better or for worse, and who would talk with her without passing out five minutes after. 

 

She recalls the sheer number of girls trying desperately to become idols, and she recalls the strong parental presence of dance moms and other kinds of harpy-like maternal figures screeching and screaming. She recalls how she must have stuck out like a sore thumb, a small child, doing next to everything by herself and for herself, without a hint of hesitation or fear. She recalls how it had made her easy prey to the hungry eyes of the judges. Anything that could easily be exploited was quick to go through. Anything that was easy to pick at the remains of, the vultures would praise. 

 

She would breeze through, beaming bright and beautiful and blue as she passed every test with flying colors. Becoming an idol was her one and only dream, and she would do anything to get there. She wasn’t joking, and she never could joke about the subject. Certain judges would prompt her on just how far she’d go, giving examples. In hindsight, it was shady, and horrible, and dehumanizing, but her determination blinded her. She always replied with yes. No was not in her vocabulary at the time. 

 

After she had been accepted, age ten, she had gotten a taste of her future life. They always start them young, lead them up to the horrible violent invasion of their very beings. It was like boiling a frog. The young girls Sayaka started her group with were not the girls she’d end her career with. Those young girls had noticed the heat, had taken note of the danger and took heed of the warning that lay beneath it, that it would not be the worst to come. Sayaka acknowledged it. She knew the lingering touches to the small of her back, she knew the light brushes of skin pulled taught over hands that inched closer and closer to an area every safety video shown at school said was not a place people were supposed to touch and that she was supposed to say no, she knew the way their eyes followed her; yet she never made a complaint.

 

Often, in interviews, later on in life, she would be asked how far she would go to achieve her dreams. 

She had never been joking when she had said she would do anything. 

 

When the touches turned invasive, and the training got harsh, she hadn’t flinched. She didn’t bat an eye at the way things took a turn. At age ten, still, she allowed them to touch her, and in return they raised her to higher and higher positions. It had started with a commercial. It went on to a large idol group, mass producing stardom in cheap flavors, and she would stay there for a time, two years, until management changed. The faces were swapped, and the touches were harsher, the acts were harsher, the training was harsher, and she was quiet through it all. Suffering in silence was the biggest thing among them. They’d never talk about it in the dressing rooms. They’d never talk about it as they waited for their respective rides. The scathing glances they’d send Sayaka as she was pulled aside by the directors and producers of music video after music video at the end of the nights, all knowing she never would have a ride waiting for her. She waited with the rest of the group anyways, until she would be pulled away for her to do favors. 

 

Her manager had always been callous and demanding. He would never just hand things over to her, and she would never expect it of him. She was pushed farther and farther up in the groups, becoming lead singer, but never being satisfied with so many other faces right next to her, drowning out her sound. Her new manager was the same way. But he demanded more of her. The exercise, the waist training, the dieting, the bingeing, the purging, all of it was nothing compared to the strain he put her under to fill the specific role he had carefully crafted for her to present to the public. He stressed the importance of appearing innocent, but open to temptation, of becoming less of a person and more of a fantasy. He stressed the importance of sales. He stressed the importance of her face. 

 

Long before that she had lost her original face. She had lost the genuine smile of her youth. She had lost it at ten years old. She perfected it at age twelve, upon her manager’s insistence. She perfected it by force. 

 

She remembers the exact incident it occurred. She remembered the slip up of her true unhappiness in her face, live on television, the way she had blanked out and become so empty and despondent, and the way the crowd had reacted. Afterwards, her manager had dragged her by her throat to a limousine, gripping her so tight she saw stars. She remembered how badly it hurt, and how badly she wanted to scream out on live television that she wasn’t happy and she never would be and all the horrible things done behind the scenes mattered. She wanted them to feel bad for allowing them to hurt her. 

 

None of that would come to pass, as she vividly would recall from time to time, only to wake up screaming. No, the only thing that she would learn in that limousine would be how to smile while it hurt. The only thing she learned in that limousine would be how to suffer in silence. She would learn how to keep her mouth shut and her face calm and placated as a man put his cigarettes out on the inside of her thighs, as the tears from before she had learned were drying on her face. Her stare was empty, and level to him, and after he would smirk and say he knew she would catch on. 

 

“You’re somethin’ else you know? Some other kind of breed.” He would say, hand rough and unwelcome in her hair. He smelled like cigarettes and sex and she loathed every moment with him. He would go on. “I knew you were cut out for this business. You’re gonna be somethin’ big one day, and I’m gonna be the one to profit off it, understand?” 

 

And she would nod, absently, as if she hadn’t heard it all before, and she stared at her clothes on the floor, and the ugly blistering yellow burns on the inside of her thighs. Her empty eyes would study the passing lights, and the dancing shadows across the floor. 

 

She would go home tired, and angry, and would tear through the living room in a fit of rage, screaming at the top of her lungs in anguish and agony and pure unfiltered fury. She would pull at her hair, being sure to never rip out too much lest she be thrown into the background again. She would bash chairs against the wall and screech out the horrors of the day, hollow and empty and flickering with a flame suppressed throughout the rest of her day, let out only in the privacy of her home. She learned how to clean the house after outbursts like these, the cleaning becoming her method of cooling down her rage. She would clean, and let it simmer down into something small and underlying. She would push it to the back of her head. But the rage would come back the moment she looked at herself. 

 

The mask of an idol that she wore upon her porcelain face had become the default. She felt utter disgust at the easy going smile pasted on like a tacky sticker. She hated how she had to actively work to scrub it off, to scrub it out, to purge it off her face. She would feel a churning in her stomach at the thought of that smile on her face, she would feel her world spin as she felt the sting of the cigarettes in her thighs, and the invasion of her being directly afterwards. And then she would feel the hot burn of the tears in her eyes, and she would fall asleep wailing. 

 

No one would lay a single hand on her for a month following the incident. It became her new form of punishment. Her manager could tell what bothered her most, and it was the feeling of being ignored, the lack of contact. If she dared to mess up, if she allowed herself to catch a cold, or trip, anything, he wouldn’t lay a hand on her, but he also wouldn’t let anyone else either. She felt the loneliness creeping in again, clawing up her throat in a bubble of tears and hysteria. She would break down and apologize, crumbling in defeat. She grew stunted, groomed to crave the violent and invasive touches, she grew to yearn for punches and cigarette burns on her thighs. 

 

She craved it for she feared it would be the only contact she could possibly get. 

 

She had been horrified by herself, and the monster she was turning into. She hated every single stretching second she spent. 

 

But it paid off in the end. Didn’t it? She became an idol soon after. She was a true idol, with an idol group. They were originally a six-member group. They were composed of the elite members of larger, more well known groups, and piggybacked off of that fame to kickstart the group’s success. All the members were the lead singers of other groups, with their own things to offer the table. 

 

Ayaka had a temper unlike anyone Sayaka had met before, always fighting management, and her, which didn’t make her very well liked. Satomi was resigned to her life of endless suffering for the stage, and that only served to set her at the lowest rung in Sayaka’s eyes. Teruyo was overly analytical to a fault and talked too much, which stopped quickly when Sayaka began to assert herself as the lead of this group of leaders. Saya, her name eerily similar to Sayaka’s, was bubbly and devoted, passionate in every aspect, and Sayaka enjoyed building her up just to knock her down. 

 

It was easy to mess with those four, they were vulnerable, they weren’t put through the same extent of emotional slaughter as Sayaka had. But the sixth member, a much more experienced idol, had. Kanna was an unstoppable force of pure spite. Sayaka hated her with her entire being. They would fight endlessly, and Sayaka couldn’t stand the fact that Kanna was always being put in the front with her. She despised sharing the stage with the vehement girl who would violate her contract at any opportunity, as if insulting the hell she went through in order just to get there. Kanna would smoke in the dressing rooms, Kanna would kiss every boy who didn’t know her name, Kanna would stamp down hard on Sayaka’s ankle and twist it in the hopes she’d be chased offstage. 

 

She wasn’t. 

 

Kanna was soon found dead at the bottom of the staircase leading from the concert hall to the parking lot. The other members of the group turned a blind eye as Kanna had tumbled down the stairs, neck making sickening snaps as her body hit the metal staircase over and over again. Sayaka was silent, but she was not suffering, her eyes aglow with a delight she’d never tasted before. 

 

She expected to be disgusted by the body. She expected to be disgusted with herself. She expected to feel a horrible thing grasp her heart and make it stall for just a moment, like the loneliness that sometimes invaded her would do. But it didn’t. Nothing really happened. She didn’t have a reaction really. It felt deserved. The other members of the group wouldn’t dare speak out, and she felt smug as she got away with it. She would sell her sob story to the police, who didn’t bother to do an investigation as the idols there all said the same thing, parroting Sayaka’s story. It was deemed an accident. 

 

Sayaka had never felt more alive. 

 

The very next day she was in her middle school classroom, watching a boy lead a heron calmly away from the school, and the kindness in his eyes reminded her of what a monster she was. His kind, calm eyes only made it worse. It made her want to punch him, to yell at him for daring to be that kind, or that happy, in her presence. She hated that heron helping boy for making her realize how much she hated herself and the things she’d done for the sake of becoming an idol. She hated it. She seethed under her skin, boiling with rage as the next group of classmates came to give their condolences and their mourn for her loss. Her hands gripped the edge of the desk tightly. No one seemed to take notice. She was a kettle, and her top was taped shut, and the pressure would never stop building. 

 

And keep building it did. Her rage and uncontrollable bitterness only got worse and less easy to contain from there. Her moods would change rapidly, flashing without rhyme or reason, but all behind the porcelain doll mask face she cemented that night in the limousine. The only thing to quell it would be messing with the members of her idol group, terrorizing them in the privacy of the dressing rooms or the make-up stations. She would pull Ayaka’s hair, or scratch at Satomi’s shoulder lightly until the skin turned raw and started to peel off and she started crying. She would call Saya terrible horrible names and insult her hopes and dreams, which turned out to be torture for Teruyo as well, who was fiercely protective of the girl for some reason, and got incredibly defensive when Sayaka would ask if she were breaking her contract just for poor pathetic little Saya. Then she’d make their manager put Ayaka in the corner on stage again, just to watch her scream.

 

She went stir crazy. She acted out more and more, let the idol mask slip just a little more every once in awhile, testing the water, though her fear was still there. It had always been a cry for someone to fix her. She was horrible, awful, but hurting others gave some sort of twisted relief. It was cathartic to tear a girl’s hair out while grinning wildly and making her friends watch, still too in shock to react. It was cathartic to light cigarettes just to put them out on skin. She wanted others to know her suffering. She didn’t care how she was perceived afterwards. She didn’t care who saw or what happened. 

 

Her punishment for this behavior was no physical contact for so long. She wouldn’t regret the things she did, and she wouldn’t start anytime soon. The lack of any human interaction broke her down, though, she couldn’t fight the need for attention, the need to stave off the horrific loneliness that swallowed her whole. She’d act out more, she wanted to be heard, but it only made it worse, and then she would get worse. She didn’t know how to be good anymore, she didn’t know who she even was. 

 

And then she got a letter accepting her to Hopes Peak Academy. She wasn’t truly happy about it. She was never truly happy about anything these days. But she supposed that it would be good publicity, and immediately informed her manager, who was over the moon about the whole ordeal, and her contact ban was quickly revoked. 

 

She was all too happy to start acting out once again, pulling hair and scratching skin and screaming like a toddler just because she could. She was all too happy to thrash Ayaka against the dressing room walls while Satomi sobbed not too far off. She was all too happy to use her Ultimate Idol title to do whatever the hell she wanted, so long as it stayed within the realms of her contract. Which it did. 

 

She had finally went home that night, staying up to meet with her father and give him the news. He had been happy for her, proud of her, and she had told him she hated him. He weeped so hard, and Sayaka brushed coldly past him, up the stairs to her room. The feeling of bitterness and vengeance was soon overtaken by an overwhelming guilt. He had done what he could, and she could only imagine the stress. And still she justified it with herself, shifted the blame unto him like she always had, and fell asleep. 

 

When morning came around, both were gone, off to drown their sorrows in their own respective vices.

 

 

In the times at Hopes Peak she had forgotten, locked in the old building with her other classmates, her behaviors in private began to show through. Her mask was cracking, she was faltering. Her perfect porcelain smile was breaking in two. She had become more aggressive, less soft, less like the idol people thought they knew, and less like the person she crafted to make people feel like they were getting closer to her. A violent angry side of Sayaka was becoming more apparent, as she fought with herself. 

 

She’d throw herself violently against walls, she’d screech at ungodly hours of the night, she’d claw at the metal panels she helped create that trapped her in here with the thing she hated because she couldn’t harm it. 

 

Makoto had her father’s eyes. The color was different, but the tired kindness, the way he seemed to consider her feelings so much, it was all too much like her father. She was swimming in her own guilt for treating her father badly, she was drowning in the regret and Makoto kept making it worse. She knew he had good intentions, but that didn’t stop her when she lashed out at him over breakfast of all things. He’d been quiet. He didn’t give her a reaction. It made her break down and cry more and hit her head against the table until Sakura would pull her away. She just wanted a reaction that’s all she wanted. She wanted him to hate her. 

 

She could feel the tension in the room snap, as she watched Mondo carefully help Makoto up off of the floor, and she would grin wickedly at the tears she saw, cackling and thrashing around in Sakura’s grip. She was stronger than she looked. She was worse than she looked. She would feel Enoshima’s sharp invasive eyes on her body, and she would jerk and twist in Sakura grip to stare her dead on, daring her to analyze her. Mukuro would stand protectively in front of her, face set in stone. But Enoshima would just grin wickedly, something akin to knowing what it was. 

 

So Sayaka would grin back, and broke into a fit of mad laughter. She was never a stable person. She’s surprised it took so long to lash out. She’s felt the overwhelming anger overcome her many times before, yet somehow she’d always find herself alone to exercise her outbursts. She’d shake with such violent intensity, gripping her sides hard as Makoto was toted off to the nurse’s office, and she was sat down in a chair. 

 

Soon it wasn’t laughter anymore. Soon it was the heartbroken wail she had heard back during her rage after the cigarette burning incident that branded her face with an idol face that would never wash off, it was the wail of a child left abandoned, it was the wail she heard herself cry when she knew she had missed her window to talk with her father. It was the wail she had suppressed behind the porcelain mask for years and years, never once breaking character. 

 

But during that time she got better. During the time in the lock down she got better. She was less violent after she stopped trying to pretend, they all hated her anyways. She’d be mean and cruel and awful. But it was a relief to finally just say what she meant instead of saying something prepared, something fake. Makoto still hung around her, and she would spew insults at him at any time she could. He would smile and take it. With people like Togami and Celeste around, insults were to be expected and promptly ignored. She would still see him flinch when she would say them though. 

 

But that progress wouldn’t last in their situation. 

 

Sayaka would smile upon the operating table as Enoshima knocked around in her head, taking away memory after memory of her school life at Hopes Peak. She and Enoshima would grin at each other, and Sayaka would revel in the satisfaction that she was right. She was always right. Nothing good would stay for long and it was better she ruined it before someone else did. 

 

So when the video was shown, showing the captives of her idol group, it was like a slap to the face. She didn’t want anyone else laying a hand on them. They were hers to torment and demean and she wouldn’t let anyone hurt them except her. And it served as a reminder of the career she had waiting outside. Or the career she assumed still existed. She couldn’t stay here, it would ruin her, she couldn’t be locked up with no contact with the outside, she had to let them know what was going on, she had to break free. 

 

Which is why it had been easy to pick the lowest common denominator, someone who was also exhausted by their talent. Leon Kuwata took a deep interest in the music industry, he wanted to be a musician, and who was Sayaka to deny him. She switched rooms with Makoto, resigning herself to do just another bad thing for the sake of being an idol. She waited for him to arrive, her face serene. 

 

In interviews before, a common question was how far she was willing to go to achieve her dreams. 

She hadn’t been joking when she said she’d do anything. 


	3. Natsumi Kuzuryuu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> didnt reread before posting and im without a beta pls bear with me

 

Natsumi Kuzuryuu dies.

 

Natsumi Kuzuryuu does not die the way she always imagined she would, clutching her phone her chest as she heard her mother’s bones break over and over, dreaming of a thousand deaths better, where she wasn’t so afraid. She doesn’t die in a flurry of bullets and screams, crumpled on the concrete like her body is as frail as newspaper, blood spilling out in waterfalls of magenta and burning bright in the reflection of neon signs along a dingy street. She doesn’t die under her father’s angry hand, who grips her arm tight enough to bruise should she ever be outside of her room when the fury begins, who throws her like a ragdoll against chairs, tables, vases, walls, and yells at her in his confusion, calling her by her mother’s name. She doesn’t die with her hand on a trigger, squeezing tight with a blast of showering bullet shells that batter against her skin, as her brother is on the other end, with his own grin and gun to match. She doesn’t die, silent, in her bed, whisked away with the morning light, leaving nothing behind between the blanket and the bedsheets but glittering stardust between her teeth, surrounded by a fake family built in her brain that cared when she caught a cold. 

 

Natsumi Kuzuryuu dies on a cold tile floor in a music room, eyes sliding shut beside a glimmering piano that plays her out on a mocking showtune, the burning hatred in Sato’s blue - almost purple - eyes settling like a stone in the bottom of her stomach. She dies a coward’s death, murdered in her lack of action against an offender that fixated so heavily on the one glowing light of hope in the sky, on a bright red bob of affections unrequited, so much so that they had ignored the deep unsettling darkness they were capable of, just to protect it. 

 

In a way, she and Sato had been the same. Had either of them stopped to look, they would have found a mirror of each other, souls who loved so deep and wide they rarely cared for themselves in order to make room for the ones they held the most dear, the ones they wished to be beside forever, the ones they wished to catch up to. But they never had. They hadn’t the time to stop and look at each other, examine their purposes and motivations. They only had time for fist fights and bruised cheeks and the taste of blood as noses got smashed and hair pulled and pocket-knives drawn. They only had time to hit each other, screaming and clawing at one another as if there wasn’t a whole class staring at them, owlishly, bewildered and frightened by the ferocity of their nature. They were hurricanes, billowing through. They were wild fires spitting and hissing at the sky, bright orange and yellow and purple licking at any poor soul that crossed their paths and leaving them scorched and burnt for days on end. 

 

They didn’t want to resemble one another, and Natsumi knew of Sato’s troubles at home. The rising debt in Sato’s household suffocated her, suffocated her home, rising up to choke them all in it’s confines. Sato would rather suffocate under that smoke, under that stress, than ever part from Mahiru. 

 

Natsumi could relate. 

 

Her home life had never been great. Her parents had long since begun to hate each other, and the presence of that hostility had been there for as long as she could remember, and even before then. They would fight, with vigor, with screaming and shouting. Natsumi would flinch every time she heard a bottle break, as the fight would begin. She’d keep quiet as she heard her mother be thrown across the room, her father shouting obscenities at her, her mother shouting back in a rancorous defiance that shook their household to it’s roots. Their house held no love in it. Their house was filled with a mother who would drink herself into a stupor, who would yell her hatred for Fuyuhiko through the walls, who would taunt him as she clawed her hands through the wall paper, ripping it to shreds between her brittle nails.

 

Their house held one distant father, who was stern and uncaring and unloving and unlovable, who when drunk called his daughter and his wife Seiji and his son Shinju. Their house held one mother, who was too close, who was horrifying in her nature, who swung and swayed like a tree in the wind as she downed bottle after bottle and ran their bank account dry and then drank some more, teetering on the edge of madness through her drunken babbles. Their house held one brother, who grew into fighting back against his mother’s rage against him, shouting back through walls and tearing at his own wallpaper, while yelling back at his father with words striking like venom from a snake. Their house held one swordswoman, who stood still as stone and was just as stone-faced, who was whispered words of duty and selflessness from the most selfish father who lived, who grew so close to the brother, who was hated by the sister of the house. Their house held one sister, who would grit her teeth and close her eyes and never leave her room when her father was home for fear of being confused with her mother, whose drunken babbling would flutter into her ears and scorch down into her skull, leaving a trail of ash in its wake.

 

Their house held one ghost, who lived without living, who the father would stroke the pictures of, speaking the name off his lips in a voice so soft it made the sister’s blood boil just to hear. The name of Shinju would be uttered like a prayer from his mouth, falling in a soft stream while every other word was toxic waste, poisoning the people who heard it. Natsumi didn’t know if this Shinju was alive or dead, if she was a nice person or not, she could never know, and she refused to ask. She just knew that this Shinju birthed her brother, and then left him in the care of two monsters, two equally awful forces of addiction and rage, who complemented each other with the terror they left in their wake. 

 

Seiji Kuzuryuu, the mother, hated Fuyuhiko with a burning passion that scorched her insides like whiskey and made her heat up until she could feel herself combust, with hatred so pungent as she existed in the house as a constant, screaming how she should have smothered him when he was an infant, when he was easy to get rid of, throwing bottles that he learned how to dodge at age six. Arashi Kuzuryuu, the father, hated Natsumi with a cold and empty gaze, with hands that would slam her around without a care for her well being, who would call her Seiji when drunk or tired, would call her a failure when not. 

 

The parents would only act civil when drunk at parties, being social and amiable, friendly even. It made Natsumi sick. Afterwards they would all return home, and Arashi would disappear into his room, muttering under his breath about the elusive Shinju who breathed through the photographs in picture frames on the walls. Seiji would grab Natsumi’s arm, dragging her to the family room, and Fuyuhiko would order Peko to watch and make sure she wasn’t hurt, but that never made Natsumi feel any better. Seiji would brush Natsumi’s hair, hands far too gentle upon her bruised and blackening skin to feel right, and she would whisper about her life before being married, before becoming the monster she was today. 

 

Seiji spoke of engineering. Seiji spoke of math and numbers and buildings and beautiful beautiful things. It made Natsumi sick to her stomach, as shaking pale hands combed through the hair that matched her own, their appearances matched near exactly, with only baby fat setting them apart. Natsumi would listen to her mother as she spoke of how much she had loved Arashi back in those days, when he was a broken boy she thought she could fix, who had parents who hated him more than he hated her, who kissed her like it was his last day alive because it might have been. Seiji spoke of meeting him when it was raining, of talking with him as she shared an umbrella with him, of his toothy grin, of the gap between his two front teeth that made him look younger than he was, of the scar on his left shoulder blade that she had kissed two years after that, calling it beautiful and poetic. She says that was the first time he hit her. She says he had yelled at her. She says that he had screamed that his pain wasn’t poetic and never would be, it was his pain, not some lifetime movie to play on repeat. Natsumi remembers how Seiji had smiled sadly at that, saying that she had known from day one he already had a girlfriend, that he already had a woman he loved, a woman named Shinju. 

 

Natsumi would try not to think about it, after escaping the grasp of her drunk mother, always drunk. She would lay in her bed, clutching her pillow to her chest as she imagined punching Peko Pekoyama’s lights out, imagined being a photographer, with a normal family. She would eventually slip back into imagining a life with Shinju instead of Seiji. She would imagine a mother who knew that being abused did not mean she could abuse her own children, who loved both of her children, even if one wasn’t necessarily hers, who would defend herself in a way that didn’t ripple like the aftershocks of an earthquake through the whole family. In her heart, Natsumi knew the real Shinju would never be someone so picturesque, but it couldn’t hurt to dream, to just let herself feel the way it could have been. 

 

Natsumi had every opportunity to leave her home. She had ever opportunity to leave and be on her own, independent and wild and empty. She could go crazy if she wanted, become that homeless woman without shoes standing in a nightgown on the corner of a suburban street, clutching soup cans and dashing them across the road. She could go corporate, and become that business woman who scoffed at the idea of having children and wore tight skirts and blouses to distract the older men at the table from the fact that she was swindling them out of their money. She could go calculus, and become and engineer like her mother had wanted to be. She could go clean, and become the photographer she wanted to be, who took photos of things she found beautiful, who never focused on people or smiles or stupid themes.

 

She never would leave, though, never. She couldn’t bear to be too far from the brother she cared for, the brother she wanted to tell mattered more to her than anything in the world. She’d defend him before herself everytime, anytime. 

 

She hated that he’d turn to Peko before her. She hated that he grew short and stunted and compensated for that by acting tough instead of just being tough. She hated that he hid what he truly enjoyed, because he feared that it would be ruined by his parents, because he feared that she would ruin it. He stopped crying when he was very young. She never stopped crying. Physical pain was nothing to her, she rarely ever cried at the bruises, the broken bones, the shards of glass caught in her arm, the knives at her throat, the bullet wounds that littered her body. She was a stretched skin canvas of scars, glowing in their injustice, yet she ran her hands along them anyways, marveling at how grateful she was to be set apart from her mother’s own perfect and unwavering beauty. She never cried at that. She only cried at the emotional pain. She cried by herself, curling up so she was small and unnoticeable, in the wake of learning of her brother’s hesitance to speak with her, of sharing aspects of himself with her. She had watched it in his body language, the way he paused, face scrunching up slightly, she watched his ringed hands scratch the surface of the counter, and watched him retreat his conversation, lying to her face, and then leaving her to go with Peko to someplace far from their strangling home. Natsumi wished she had a reason to leave the house as well, some kind of excuse she could use to skip out on making sure her home was never ambushed. It wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. Rival yakuza families got cocky sometimes, and came for the heart, always thinking they could be the exception. 

 

Being in a yakuza family was exhausting. Before Fuyuhiko was chosen as the heir, they had both had to fight for the title. They had both had to scramble as their father would organize tests to see who would be worthy enough to inherit the title. Fuyuhiko had never shown any interest in the family business, and would only get involved when pushed to. He didn’t want it at all. Natsumi had. She’d fought tooth and nail for it, viscous in her ways. She had won every challenge, she had already been involving herself with the business before, going on bank heists and fighting in the streets alongside the muscle that made up their 6,000 member family. She held a gun in her hand, she held a knife in her other, hair tied up in a tight messy ponytail. She’d lit a molotov cocktail on fire, tossing it with all her might before it hit it’s mark, and set a sleek black car ablaze. She’d done the dealings behind the scene, as Arashi grew disinterested and shouldered the responsibility on her shoulders, and she would carry it without complaint, arranging exploits and political bribes, anything she was allowed to do, she would. She had won every single challenge, and still managed to lose.

 

Her tears were bitter and angry. She lost because was unable to be present for the final week of challenges. She lost because in her middleschool years she was dragged into a car, on her way to school, and held for ransom in some scummy abandoned apartment building, tied to a pillar of concrete. She would stare evenly at the perpetrators, as they tried to garner a response from her, some sign of fear. They hit her leg with a sledge hammer, and she’d get rope burns along her wrists and ankles from the way she thrashed and writhed in pain. But she would not scream. She wouldn’t cry. They’d leave larcerations in their wake, trying to get her to scream and shout and cry, but she couldn’t, and she wouldn’t, and all she would do is stare at them, anger evident in everything she was. 

 

They had called her father repeatedly, wanting money, wanting something in return for giving her back. Her father couldn’t care less about her, refusing, and she could hear the disinterest in his voice from where she was tied. Eventually, while the ones who held her captive were out from a smoke, she broke her bonds. She would stand, pain shooting up her leg with intensity, stealing money off of the table before walking out the front door, limping down the sidewalk with a purpose. They wouldn’t follow her, her father obviously wasn’t budging, and she wasn’t fun to hurt. She was just a bruised girl, walking home, who stopped at a payphone to call and ask for a ride. Her father had called her a moron, telling her she had lost. 

 

She had cried then, listening to him hang up on her. She had cried as she limped to the tennis courts at her middle school, and climbed a tree in her pain, sitting on the branch as she mourned the loss of her title, and her camera. It was broken. As was her phone. She sat in that branch until dawn, leaning against the trunk as she let her wounds fester and itch, eyes empty and blank. Her passion was killed that day, as the sun rose slowly and simmered across the horizon, and her empty olive eyes settled on the way the tennis courts began to bake.

 

She would climb down the tree and walk home when she knew her father wouldn’t be home, and let Fuyuhiko be concerned and help her to her room, setting her on her bed, and leaving soon after, shutting the door behind him. Arashi never told him what happened in that week she was gone, and Natsumi didn’t either, her mouth shut tight in her pain. She never told him, as she healed herself when she woke up the day after,  glaring at Peko’s red eyes who followed her across the family room. She never could tell him. She was bitter, and angry. He didn’t want the title he got, but she had, she always had, it was a part of her, the spitfire that flowed through her veins. She was back to taking care of the family business, heir or not, within a day. She organized a gas station scam. She scheduled meet-ups with other yakuza families. 

 

She checked her phone after it was fixed. No new messages. 

 

Fuyuhiko was chosen to be the Ultimate Yakuza. 

Natsumi wished he wouldn’t go where she could not follow. 

She was glad Peko was gone, though, even if it left the taste of copper in her mouth to think of how Peko would always be one step closer to Fuyuhiko than Natsumi could get. This time at Hopes Peak would only serve to drive them closer together, more like brother and sister than brother and sister had been. 

 

The first year Fuyuhiko spent at Hopes Peak had been a lonely one for Natsumi, and she had cried every night the first week he was gone. He did not miss her. Her presence was invasive, unwelcome to him, she could see it in the way he drew back from her like her touch was scalding. His pride made him want to stand on his own, independent from Peko and Natsumi both. His pride drove him to wound her without knowing, as she drew in on herself, existing in a state of forlorn acceptance. It was in that empty lonely year that she grew herself a new passion, one separate from being the heir to the yakuza family she dedicated her life to, and separate from the photography she had loved so dearly that she had now stopped dabbling in altogether. 

 

Her new passion was to catch up to her brother, in any way possible, to stay by his side comfortably, like Peko did. She wanted to be welcome in his company, silently acknowledged and appreciate, regardless of his pride. 

 

At first, the reserve course had seemed like her saving grace. 

 

It was a chance, finally, to be near the brother she had felt so disconnected from. 

 

And then it was just another chance for people to look down on her. She would seath, anger evident in every movement. She wouldn’t allow anyone to consider her less than what she was. She was talented, she was bright, she could be anything she wanted to be and she didn’t some dumbass arbitrary title to tell her so. She would shout that, she would shout that loud and angry, riling the sloth from the static blue that consumed the rest of her classmates. Even if they were angry at her, it was better than the blank empty stares she would get otherwise. 

 

The only kids in her class that stood out were Sato and Hajime. Natsumi would remember Sato with bile in her throat, spewing out her anger towards her in fuming words that would bewilder anyone who heard them. She would speak about her as if she were speaking about a plague. But she would remember Hajime fondly, voice lilting through the air like a sharpened knife being swiped through nothing. Beautiful, dangerous, fond. He was her first friend, someone she knew for such a short time but trusted so much. He was the only static blue that snapped out of his trance, willing to push past the curtain that separated the reserve course from the main course students. She had helped him sneak into the main course building with her only once, she’d done it many times before and many times after, and he had been so afraid, so fun to mess with. She’d lead him through halls, and told him if he didn’t wear his reserve course uniform, and walked like he had a purpose, no one would bother him as soon as they were in the building. Of course she was right. 

 

She remembered him consoling her, as the sun dipped hazily around them. She remembered telling him how badly she wanted to catch up, how badly she needed to be beside her brother, how she hated how lonely she felt even when he was around, as he always looked to Peko first. She remembers his sympathetic look, she remembers his voice. She remembers squeezing his hand tightly, her grip strong enough to hurt, him wincing, but laughing anyways. 

 

His words had permeated in her skull, echoing like a choir, and she went to her dorm weightless. 

 

She talked to her brother the day before her murder, eyes soft, trying to get him to mimic her. Eventually he would break, expressing himself fully, for once thank god, in a conversation with her that felt so refreshing, so cathartic. 

 

He would apologize for winning, knowing how bad she had wanted it, how bad she still wanted the title of heir to the Kuzuryuu clan. He would apologize, guilt dripping from his tongue like honey, a balm on her bitterness, a balm on her old wounds that she kept picking at and reopening within the late hours of the night, spinning herself into a tizzy and falling onto her dorm floor and letting herself die night after night. 

 

He called her amazing. 

And then she would speak. 

“I don't want to lead the clan. The reason I'm so amazing is because I'm your sister...” 

It was a lie, a blatant lie. Well, at least the first part of her sentence. She wanted to lead the clan, she wanted it badly, she could do it to, she practically did from the sidelines, all hushed tones and untapped potential. Her brain was beautiful, blinding, and yet she used none of it, dedicated to the family that couldn’t care if she caught a cold. 

 

She would go to her dorm that night, again, spinning herself into a tizzy and falling onto the floor, gripping at the dark red carpeting like it was her lifeline, laughing into the cheap material. She felt carnal, animalistic, outside of who she was. She was tired, so so tired. She had lied to him that day, she had told him she didn’t want to lead the clan. But she had also told the truth, her truth. She found herself unremarkable, unimportant. The reserve course had finally broken her, despite her attempts to stay away from the static blue that took the rest of them all away, except for Hajime. 

 

She took her first photograph in ages that night, of her hand that contrasting against the dark red carpet, looking angelic as the light from her bathroom flooded into her room at an odd angle that caught the dust in it’s light. The dark red carpet reminded her of her mother. It jogs her memory of how her mother had worn a deep red lipstick, one that made her look like she had kissed death and walked away with it’s soul, running on fumes. 

 

Natsumi would sit up, standing in that sea of deep red carpet, and reach into the beauty bag her mother had shoved into her hands with a wry smile before her departure to the reserve course. She would pull out the shiny black tube, old from years of use, yet still looking brand new. Her footsteps would change from shuffles on carpet to patters against tile. Her olive eyes would bore holes into herself, the shining silver of the mirror capturing her beauty. With a shaky hand she would apply the lipstick, staring at the face rid of baby fat, scars starting to become near invisible due to her no longer living at the house anymore. 

 

She looked nothing like her mother.

She looked everything like her mother.

 

She hates how she looks so similar to her mother, how she looked so similar to the woman that her father hated the most in his life, that drove him to hate her just as much. She smiles like an infant, her mouth is a wound. Her teeth look brittle against the shining slick red pulled taut across her face. She bleeds from the open wound, she speaks to her reflection in the mirror as if it’s her mother, she pours her heart out, she practices lines she’ll never get to repeat to the woman named Seiji’s face. She wouldn’t have done it if she had lived anyways. 

 

By the time morning comes and she steps out of her room, the red lipstick tube is in the garbage, and her lips are clean once again. She keeps her face empty of make-up. She hopes it comes across as rebellious, instead of her just being far too frightened to resemble her mother. 

 

And then she dies. 

 

She dies cold, propped against a wall, eyes sliding shut. Her mouth forms a perfect ‘o’, body going limp, and then hardening as rigor mortis set in, keeping her firmly in place. She dies wishing she could have lied more to her brother, kept away his guilt, kept away his despair. She wishes she had talked to Hajime more, kept away his decision, kept away his despair too. She wishes she had grown up to be a woman who could smile and wear make-up unapologetically and not fear her resemblance to her mother or anyone else. She wishes she could have been a yakuza heir, who could lead without a second thought, without a second doubt. 

 

She wishes she could have been a photographer, taking pictures of things she found beautiful. 

She wishes she had a fake family who cared if she caught a cold. 

She wishes she had grown to make that family bigger, who would be at her death bed when she would be whisked away into glittering stardust and teeth between the blanket and the bedsheets. 

She wishes she could have watched the sunrise with both her brother and her first friend, smiling without a care for pride or family or whatever. 

She wishes she could have looked past her own pride and told Sato she was sorry, told Mahiru she was sorry. 

She wishes she didn’t feel so robbed. 

  
  
  


She dies, her body not becoming stardust or teeth, just laying there in the music room next to a shiny piano that reminded her of a lipstick tube that she had thrown away the night prior. She dies, her body a heavy corpse to weigh on her brother’s back like stone, as he slipped into despair, taking Sato’s life just the day after. She dies, her death a mystery to drive Hajime into a pod that turned him into a mere phantom of who he was before, with eyes that Natsumi hated. 

 

She dies, quick to be shoved into someone else’s backstory, as she always had been, resigned to her life in her brother’s shadow, resigned to her life in her mother’s shadow, resigned to her life in Shinju’s shadow, resigned….

 

Resigned. 


	4. Sato

Sato dies with the scent of rainwater heavy on the roof of her mouth. 

The smell fills her with guilt, angry and rearing and showing so plainly through the thin windows of her mind. It was hard to see at first, with the smoke and smog of her obsession and the weighing debt pushing against the glass, leaving nothing to be seen behind it. But the rainwater came, and the smoke left, leaving the fleeting feeling of regret. But none of it would ever be as strong as the pride she felt from protecting the one thing in her life that meant the most to her. 

Mahiru Koizumi. 

Sato loved Mahiru more than she could ever love herself. Sato loved Mahiru with every fiber of her being, with every ounce of what she was. She breathed out her love and it congealed in the air as if every room was freezing. To Sato, every room might as well have been freezing if Mahiru wasn’t in it. 

Mahiru Koizumi felt like a warm flame in winter months. She felt like how apples tasted. Mahiru was endlessly pleasant, and Sato could never bring herself to wrinkle her nose when the scent of whatever liquid used to make photos reached her. Mahiru left Sato breathless without even so much as a passing brush of fingers. Sato yearned for more, always more, never satisfied with what she had. Sato wanted to kiss Mahiru senseless until their bodies melted like wax into each other and cooled down into a hardened puddle on the floor. Sato wanted to tell Mahiru that she loved her while Mahiru was awake, and she wanted Mahiru to say it back. 

That would never come to pass however, even before Sato died, even before Sato killed. Sato, all that time, was begging for love, silently, as if Mahiru couldn’t hear her. Mahiru must have known. She must have smelt it in the air when Sato was around, she must have tasted the desperate on her skin. Sato doesn’t know which would be worse. Perhaps Mahiru being oblivious would have been better, perhaps Mahiru treating her unkindly would have been better, than knowing how Sato felt so strongly for her. 

“You know that we’re friends, right Sato?” Mahiru would ask, feeling like how apples tasted.

“Of course.” Sato would reply, her desperation permeating and congealing in the air in apple shaped heartbreak. 

Sato doesn’t know when she started to feel so worthless. She doesn’t know why she found the unavailable so alluring, a moth drawn to the flame. A moth drawn to the flickering beautiful warm flame in the winter months. A moth drawn to a flame that felt like how apples tasted. There were others in her life, others who loved her, who ached for romance from her snowy hands. There was the girl she met on the train, who called her eyes as beautiful as her mouth, and stroked her hair as if it wasn’t limp and dead and the color of rotting vines stuck to a crumbling brick wall.

She didn’t like her eyes and she didn’t like her mouth. She had her father’s eyes and her mother’s mouth, and on her face they were still together. Still unhappily married on her face as her father reached out towards the men he yearned for during those years, and her mother grew colder and crueler and more sickly than ever. She didn’t like her eyes, attached to someone who sacrificed his own well being to stave away the guilt of tearing Sato in two. Two whole pieces to pick up and put together to march on to a funeral two years after the separation. He couldn’t have waited two years. Two years. 

The worst part was that Sato could barely hate him. She couldn’t fault him for what he did because there wasn’t a grand betrayal and there was no fighting. Her parents had lived like roommates, good friends, good roommates, who barely spoke to one another as their jobs held different hours, and left them both with little to no interaction. Neither of them hated one another, and neither of them spoke with bile on their tongues. Sato couldn’t hate him. She wished she could be more angry at him, she wanted to make things better. But she couldn’t bear to see the way the light would flicker out of her father’s eyes. It reminded her too much of herself. It was too much like herself when Mahiru would pointedly ignore a romantic advancement. 

Sato had been tossed between their households like a ragdoll, flung back and forth, with her mom on the weekends and with her dad during weekdays. She hated it when it was happening of course, but once her mother passed away, a phantom in a hospital gown, she missed it dearly. She missed sitting at night with her mother on the porch among the crickets and cicadas and mosquitos. She missed watching her mother breathe out smoke with her back ramrod straight and proud, looking like a dragon on top of her horde. 

She missed her mother, who was everything Sato was not. 

Her mother had been headstrong and wild, angry and vengeful and not at all beautiful, unafraid of hurt or of hurting, completely unromantic. Sato’s mother had been a business woman, ruthless and unsympathetic and entirely wholly herself. Her mother held no empathy for those beneath her, but she would never hurt her husband, and she would never hurt her daughter. Sato had looked up to her, to the way she didn’t seem to care when she’d smell vodka on the breath of her daughter, simply telling her how to hide it from her father when he came home, or when she went back to his home later on. 

Her mother wasn’t anything like a mother, with moles peppering her skin like constellations, and a cigarette hanging off of her lips always, constantly, smoke rising as she would breeze through numbers and make angry phonecalls. The second-hand smoke would turn Sato’s lungs to tar, but she loved every minute of it. Because her mother cared in different ways, cared about the important things, would march into school, parading Sato’s middleschool wound around the front office and yelling with an angry staccato rhythm. Those in the office would shrink back, and say that there was nothing they could do, and Sato’s mother would knock the decorative figurines off the desk with fury, letting them shatter on the floor before marching out, seething and wishing for revenge in a way she could manage. 

Her mother had been so sickly at the time, practically breaking with every single action, Sato had been terrified she’d hurt herself trying to find out why the Kuzuryuu kid wasn’t getting in some deep shit for leaving a nasty angry scar on her own child’s arm. Sato worried so much for her then, because they all knew she had ovarian cancer, they all knew she was getting weaker and weaker and refused treatment and refused time off from work. Her mother was unflinching, her mother was never fearful, she faced death like it was an old friend, an old colleague, just as she had faced the Kuzuryuu family patriarch, with his gamblers smile and threatening spiteful words. 

Unlike Sato, her mother had never once been afraid, not once had she seen a pang of fear cross her features, and Sato knew the minute it did happen it would feel like looking at a graveyard. Time seemed to disappear around her mother, flowing down the drain into liminal space, and talking to her came easy, it was almost like breathing. Her skin was darker, and Sato almost wished for her own skin to be the beautiful golden brown palette her mother’s skin had carried, but she truthfully doesn’t mind her own pallid appearance. She doesn’t mind the pale snowy skin she inherited from her father’s mother, who never spoke to them after the divorce, because to her, seeing her own blood was beautiful. She took plenty of photos of her veins when she was in the photography club, never to be shown.

She loved watching the life in her fingers. Which is why she loved taking photos of things one could almost hear, smell, taste, see moving. She loved the rivets of rivers, she loved the trails of veins, she loved the sunlight sweltering down through swaying trees. She loved all of it, took endless photographs of it, she couldn’t help herself. 

She took photos of the major events in her life. She took photos like the world was ending around her. She took photos of her mother's declining health. She took photos of her mother on her deathbed. She took photos of her mother’s corpse, nestled comfortable on an armchair, foreign cigarette hanging lazily out of her mouth, a puff of smoke all that was left of her, as the crickets hummed a familiar rhythm. She took photos of her father mourning. She took photos of him coming home late, with a man she neither knew nor trusted under his arms as he walked through the front door, porch light illuminating them from behind and casting long shadows down the hallway as Sato viewed them silently and unnoticed from above on the stairwell. She took photos of their wedding a year later. 

She stopped taking photos when middleschool ended. 

What was the point in taking photos anymore? There was nothing to take photos for. Mahiru had all that covered, was deemed the best at it, and while Sato couldn’t understand why Mahiru’s photos of smiles won out over her life, or even that crazy Kuzuryuu’s surrealist compositions, she could recognize talent when she saw it. So, she stopped. There was no use to take photos. Mahiru was the best at it, and it would be treading on turf that did not belong to her. 

In the year that Mahiru was gone to Hopes Peak Academy, Sato nearly lost her mind. 

She had been quiet about the loss at first, just as she had been over her mother’s death, but soon turned to desperation, doing anything she could possibly do to get into that school. She had to be with Mahiru, she had to help her in any way she could, or else she’d be useless. She’d be nothing without Mahiru, who was her whole world. She couldn’t bear it, she just couldn’t. 

The Reserve Course was a blessing.

Sato begged and pleaded and screaming and coerced her father into getting her in. He took out loans to pay the hefty tuition fee upon her command, breaking when she pulled out the divorce card. She had never done that before, so why would she do this now? She doesn’t fully know her motivations, and feels almost ashamed of herself. That’s quickly quelled, however, next year, when she arrives at school, and waits for Mahiru by the front gate. 

Mahiru arrives, toting along a blonde girl. Sato can feel her hackles rising, and she grits her teeth at the sight of the blonde overdressed squealing brat hanging off of Mahiru like she belonged there. Mahiru spots her, and smiles at her. Sato was hoping for more of a reaction. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter how badly she’s treated. 

It’s her chance to be close to Mahiru, and it allows her to further follow her. She can only hope Mahiru will allow her to continue to follow her, a bright beacon of hope in an otherwise dreary world. Her heart aches. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter how badly she’s treated. 

The days tick by. The boy in the back of class stares wistfully out the window, eyes clouded with something Sato can tell is both terrifying and intriguing. She knows he’s thinking of heavy thoughts, not just what drama the ultimates are getting into, not about trends, she can see the cogs turning in his head as she stares at him behind her. He turns to look at her, feeling the scorching gaze of cold indigo, and she turns back towards the front of the room. They do not talk to each other.

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter how badly she’s treated. 

Sato watches the brat and Mahiru grow closer, but to her smug satisfaction, Mahiru still chooses to eat lunch with her, over in the Reserve Course building. While new, it’s still practically in shambles. No one knows where the real funding from the Reserve Course tuitions goes, but they don’t question it. This is the best they could ever ask for, and the best they’ll ever get. Sato is resigned to her life as a background character, doomed a slave to the details of Mahiru’s freckles and apple hearth.   
Sato doesn’t tell Mahiru that her cooking is bland. She doesn’t tell her that their conversations are painfully dull. She doesn’t tell her that her photos look lifeless with the people staring performatively at the cameras. Sato doesn’t say a word, and she knows Mahiru holds back her criticisms as well, what with the way she sometimes opens her mouth to speak, and then shuts it, biting the inside of her cheek.   
Sato knows. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter how badly she’s treated. 

Natsumi Kuzuryuu arrives, and the scent of rainwater returns to Sato’s life, and unwelcome scent. The Kuzuryuu doesn’t even wear perfume, she just constantly smells like the aftermath of a thunderstorm. For all intents and purposes, Natsumi Kuzuryuu is a hurricane billowing through, angry and stormy and uncaring of anything around her; an unstoppable force uprooting everything that gets in her way, and tossing it to the side as if it never mattered in the first place.   
Sato’s nose is soothed by the presence, different from the way it would burn around Mahiru, but the old scar from middle school begins to fester again, the old scar that wasn’t just on her arm. She’d been picking at the scab inside her skull for years, and the arrival of the Kuzuryuu simply makes it more insistent. The paranoia rises up her throat, nearly choking her like the smoke of the debt from shady loan sharks back home.   
Natsumi Kuzuryuu is a hurricane, an unstoppable force, uprooting anything in her way and tossing it aside as if it never mattered in the first place.   
Mahiru is in her way. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter how badly she’s treated. 

The paranoia gets worse. The Kuzuryuu’s rainwater took over the classroom, her harsh words pelting hail upon the class, mainly directed at her she assumed. Sato watches the Kuzuryuu make unlikely friends with the wistful staring boy in the back of the classroom. They talk in hushed tones, and no one else can make out the murmurs they share, except for when Natsumi shouts a few things, perhaps warnings to keep others away from prying into their private affairs and business.   
Sato couldn’t care less, so long as the wistful staring boy, Hajime Hinata she thinks his name is, keeps the most dangerous Kuzuryuu away from Mahiru. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing, no matter what happens.

Sato can’t control the fear that overtakes her. She attacks the storm, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She vaguely remembers planning the attack. She can almost recall the way she swung down hard. She can faintly feel the way the blood splattered, mixing iron with rainwater. Everything was fogged up with smoke. Her father was stressed, getting frantic, he couldn’t pay the millions of debts he owed, and the now dead girl had threatened everything Sato had worked for. The now dead girl had threatened Mahiru. 

Sato stares down at her snowy hands. She conspires with Mahiru, she regrets and she cries, but she can’t shake the image of the most dangerous Kuzuryuu, the most desperate and angry and unstoppable member of the whole family, looking peaceful and harmless, almost beautiful, dead and propped up against the wall. Sato grips her hair and tugs harshly at it. 

She goes manic, she panics, she runs and tries to go into the classroom but the scent of rainwater is so strong, it's everywhere, it’s billowing through, her mind is a storm and while the smoke was choking her still, the rain offered freshness, yet kept her in the dark. She can’t take it. 

When the smaller Kuzuryuu chases her, eyes alight with grief, she can smell it from far away. He smells like rainwater, only not a hurricane, no one was a hurricane like Natsumi was. The boy is a tropical storm, he can be weathered, but Sato isn’t in the right mind to weather. She gives out a cry when she’s struck down, killed in the same fashion. Poetic justice she supposes. 

She dies faster than she would like, and she feels ashamed of herself, for being as scared as she is to die. She knows her mother is waiting, but Natsumi is waiting as well, and without a doubt will not be friendly. 

She barely registers the sharp smell of iron, as rainwater floods her senses, and she goes out yearning and begging and pleading for her apple hearth, or the burn of cigarette smoke in her lungs from her mole-speckled mother. She wanted Mahiru. She wanted her mother. She wanted to apologize. She didn’t know what for. 

Her indigo eyes had already lost their light, the color in them had dulled years ago, and Sato wasn’t entirely sure when, but she’s sure it’s gone now, and it’s not coming back. She had always looked like a walking corpse, eyes of course dull, and skin so pallid and pale and thin one could mistake her for a victim of hypothermia. 

So when she’s found it’s almost assumed to be a prank. 

It isn’t. 

The taste of rainwater is overwhelming. 

The Reserve Course is a blessing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this chapter took so long, ive been going through a roller coaster of emotions and school started up again, which tends to ruin everything


	5. Mukuro Ikusaba

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another request done!   
> im glad i had enough inspiration to squeeze this one out as fast as i did, whew

 

Mukuro dies knowing it was the only way to make her sister truly happy. 

 

Her whole life was dedicated to her sister, even in youth, everything was for Junko. It wasn’t questioned on her behalf. She was the older twin, she held more responsibility, she could fight back, so she had to defend Junko. Junko was her little sister, her everything, and all she really had in life. She had no potential for anything good, or even bad, except through Junko. She’s sure of it. She knows it. She knows Junko better than anyone else. She’s the only one who could really understand her. That’s why she has to…

 

She has to die for her. She has to die for Junko in order to save her. Either that or betray her and… Mukuro isn’t sure that she’d have the will for that. She doesn’t know if she’d be able to stand not being in Junko’s direct line of sight at all times. Maybe in another life, where she could have someone remember her for herself instead of for being Junko’s sister, or imposter, where she could have the strength to please her sisters endless search for despair by going against her. 

 

But here, she doesn’t have the strength for it. She only has the strength to go through with the motions, to go through the freak out, and to die in Junko’s planned bullshit poetic way, Spears of Gungir. Mukuro doesn’t mind too much, she was bound to die by Junko’s hand one way or another, what with the way her sister would attack her viciously from the day she got back from Fenrir, to the day she died. Yet, it still made her heart ache as her bleeding body collapsed onto the gym floor, only useful for so long before becoming dead weight. 

 

Mukuro figures in those final moments, upon realizing how much of her life was wasted serving Junko, that she should have had this epiphany years ago. She should have had this epiphany while Junko verbally abused her to get what she wanted. She should have had it when Junko made her believe that their stern parents hated her and that’s why they were quietly attempting to divorce one another. She should have had it when Junko told her she was stupid for wanting to be a soldier and a singer. She should have had it when Junko dragged her away from the house and told her that they couldn’t live there anymore, that they’d have to be homeless for a while until their parents could sort out their non-existent violence by themselves. She should have had it when Junko smacked her around for all those years back when they lived with their parents, back when Junko shoved her off the balcony and into the rose bush, called her fat, stupid, ugly, a waste of space, a waste of breath, a pig. 

 

She hadn’t, though. She hadn’t had the epiphany then. She hadn’t known it was all lies Junko had fed into her from the start. Realizing it all those years later, with the tang of betrayal bitter in her mouth lasting briefly before her life was snuffed out, hurt. It hurt more than the name calling and abuse had. It hurt more later on, when Mukuro knew it was all over, so much more than during the ordeal. 

 

Even then, even knowing all this, she still couldn’t help but care for Junko. She wanted to see her happy. She wanted to see her smile all bright and big and beautiful, pleased with herself and her work. She wanted to see Junko smile from the heart, even if it was while killing her, even if it was while bringing dead animals over to her just to watch her get upset over it, even if it was while killing Yasuke, even if it was while the world burned down around her. Mukuro truthfully didn’t want anything to do with despair. She didn’t want anything to do with throwing the the whole world into chaos and misery. She felt bad for the people suffering under Junko’s hand, but she couldn’t help herself anymore, she was conditioned to live only for Junko, for the one consistent person in her life. Everyone else was always so confusing, even Makoto, kind smiling Makoto who Mukuro fell in love with on the spot. 

 

Makoto. Mukuro wanted to apologize to him, she wanted to apologize so bad. Seeing his kind eyes harden under the stress, seeing him struggle with the people around him, she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t bear to see him so unhappy. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve to suffer like that at all, and she wanted it to stop. She wanted to make things right. She wanted to hold him close to her person and tell him how sorry she was that she’d help to create the hell he was in now, and how awful it was of her to do this to him, to all of them. Oh if only she had the strength. If only she had the guts to say everything that was on her mind. 

 

But she hadn’t. And now she was dead. 

 

She supposes she’d set herself up for this. From her first day on this earth she had done everything for Junko. She’d come out of her mother first, Junko close behind. She was a stronger baby, much more healthy with far more potential, but Junko had been far prettier. Everyone fawned over Junko, catered to her every need, and Mukuro had been no exception. When Junko began to frown at the adult’s attention, Mukuro would push them away from her, or find a quiet place to let Junko complain to her about how dumb they all were, how dumb Mukuro herself was. Mukuro would just take it. Why would Junko ever lie to her? Why would she need to? There wasn’t a reason Mukuro could think of, therefore Junko had to be telling the truth. She was stupid. She was ugly. She was fat. She was whatever Junko said she was, and she was happy about it. 

 

They both grew from toddlers to children, back then they both held different names than the ones they sported now, real names forgotten in the dust of that mansion already burned to the ground now. Junko was heavily influenced by her mother. Mukuro took after her father. Their parents never smiled, and when they did it was always fake and condescending, but they still held their influence. Their mother was a young and hungry starlet, a strikingly beautiful one at that, with red hair that was soft and shimmered in the light. Their father was a very old businessman, a veteran, and positively obsessed with all things beautiful but deadly. Mukuro would pay rapt attention to his descriptions of battlefields, to his explanations of different kinds of weapons, and his adoration of battle strategy. Junko would yawn and roll her eyes. Mukuro was captivated. Junko enjoyed their mother’s rare little life lessons much more than their father’s. Mukuro couldn’t blame her, their mother spoke casually and was just as rude and vicious as Junko grew up to be. Just as gorgeous, as well. Their mother would talk of how to seduce men into doing practically anything for them, going for the lowest common denominator, not being afraid to get gross for the sake of power and attention and money most importantly. Their mother talked to them like adults, and Junko liked that. Mukuro found it to mean that their mother never wanted to birth them in the first place. 

 

Their home was always cold. Neither parent was particularly warm with them. Their mother did her best to keep distance between herself and them, and while their father’s intentions were always good, he was hopelessly incapable of showing it. So she and Junko simply grew up to be cold. Junko was cold hearted. Mukuro was just cold. No one was intimate in any way with one another, and Junko actively condemned contact between them, so Mukuro just grew up not at all used to contact in any way. It showed in her school years. 

 

People would flock around Junko, even in the boarding schools they attended full of equally amazing children, Junko just seemed to draw them all in. Mukuro seemed to only be capable of chasing them away. Either through her interests or appearance, she doesn’t know, just that no one wanted to be her friend. That was fine. She didn’t really need friends. In her head, all she needed was Junko. 

 

Still, even with Junko, she was lonely. Anyone who spoke with her would inevitably be chased away by her one way or another, mainly by Junko’s interference. Junko herself wasn’t typically very good company at all, and Mukuro simply couldn’t talk about her interests at all, or Junko would yell and hit her and call her stupid and boring. That was a word that was tossed around a lot. Boring. 

 

So with no other outlet to talk about the things Mukuro liked, she took to the internet. It was nice, if a bit daunting at first. She was still very young, so her grammar and typing weren’t the best, but she did what she could, and found a great community for people interested in survival and weaponry. She would write for journals, and magazines, and get free shipments of new things for her to review. It was nice! And fun! And she really enjoyed it. Her father was enthusiastic about her hobby -- when he was home that is -- but her mother and Junko repeatedly showed their disinterest and disgust. Mukuro didn’t throw her things away like they told her to, which was the single act of defiance she’d ever shown either of them. 

 

Eventually she’d gotten invited to participate in a survival game tournament. She accepted immediately, buzzing with excitement and planning strategies, none of which were very good, for weeks. In the end, the strategies didn’t matter, because everything came naturally to her. It was a wonderful experience, and she was riding off the high of winning. The trophy was heavy in her hands, and her small tentative smile betrayed how happy she was to win. 

 

The ride home in the car with her father had been filled with an unfamiliar chatter. They spoke of weapons and Mukuro listened to more stories about his time in war than she had in all her years prior, because Junko wasn’t at all there to ruin it. Junko wasn’t there to complain about how stupid it all was. Junko wasn’t there at all. So Mukuro was beaming. She was practically floating along as she came home. She put the trophy on the same shelf she put the things she found in the forest behind their estate on, and went down to dinner. 

 

Junko asked her to go get the mail after dinner. Mukuro didn’t really know what for, and she didn’t know why, but she figured ruining Junko’s good mood would ruin her own, so she agreed to it without discussion. She marched out, down the long stretch of driveway, and opened the double-sided mailbox by the large steel gate. There was nothing inside of it aside from the corpse of a rat, it’s head twisted painfully around to the other side of it’s body, downy soft white fur still warm. Mukuro assumes Junko put it there to toy with her, but she’d been getting better at controlling her reactions to the dead animals Junko would hide in her room or throw at her. So she took the poor thing out of the mailbox and tossed it into the rows of flowers skirting the edges of their estate, among the petunias. 

 

She’d turn around, walking back up to the house, a squelching squealing feeling of dread rolling in her stomach, cold and smooth as stone and weighing heavy. She returned to the house with great trepidation, her throat tightening. She climbs up the familiar staircase, hands running against the smooth bannister with cool gold trimming that sends a chill up her arm and makes her hair stand on edge. She reaches the top of the stairs, feet silent on the tile so clean she can see her reflection in them through the dim lights. Her bedroom door has been left wide open. 

 

When she walks in she starts to cry. 

 

The shelf with the trophy, and all the assortment of things she found, is smashed on the ground. The remains of all on the shelf were scattered across the room, all in pieces, even her trophy. Her eyes stung as she looked on in horror, fat hot tears falling down the sides of her face as she fell hard to her knees. She gave out a strangled cry as her fingers gently brushed across a jagged piece of bone from the skull of a deer, now nothing but unrecognizable pieces of a puzzle she’d never be able to put back together. 

 

There are soft footsteps behind her, and she can’t bring herself to look behind her as her hands begin to shake. She’s quiet, as she always is, in her grief, and she tries to quiet herself even more with the familiar presence now behind her. A kick hits her hard on her back, and her instincts tell her to spin around and fight and yell, but she simply falls forwards and lays on the floor, and forces herself to be still. The foot digs hard into her back, grinding down on her spine with a tiny heel. 

 

“Wow, I didn’t know you’d be this choked up about all this stupid shit. You really are pathetic trash, aren’t you?” Comes the snide voice of her sister, and she can hear the smirk dripping off her words, the malice that floods her lungs. She should’ve known. 

 

She lays there, still as stone, long after Junko gets bored of her and leaves. She lays there for a long time. After this instance she doesn’t decorate her room at all. She’s much more compliant with Junko’s wishes. She doesn’t breathe a word of her ideas of plans to anyone, her father included, because her father would tell her mother, and her mother would tell Junko, and then it’d all be ruined. 

 

She falls back into the mundanity of another year passed, another summer goes by. Their parents want to send them to a very strict boarding school to get Junko’s behavior in check. Mukuro only learns this when they go back after a school year of being homeless. Junko hadn’t wanted to go, she wanted to stay and go through with her own plans. 

 

Junko had tricked her, again, and told her of their parents private violence and hatred, and convinced her to run away with her. And she had. For a whole school year they lived in forests and in streets, and Mukuro would provide for her, always letting her eat first and the most. Sometimes Mukuro wouldn’t get to eat at all. But she figured it was the least she could do to provide for her little sister. It was the least she could do to keep her safe. Even when homeless and next to starving, Junko still looked, acted, and was treated like a queen. 

 

But then they go back. And Mukuro realizes it had all been for the stupidest reason she could imagine. Junko lies, easy as pie, says someone had kidnapped them and took them very far away, and they worked really hard to come back. Mukuro just nods absently when they ask her to confirm what had happened. 

 

Junko gives her a look of praise for going along with the lie. And that look alone made it all worth it. It made it all so much better. It was a balm. Praise was rare. Genuine smiles were rare. Mukuro felt her heart swell with pride. She’d made Junko smile. She could withstand even more just to do it again. She could do it. She knew she could. 

 

Another summer passes. They go back to school. Mukuro continues to be lonely. Junko continues to mess with Yasuke. Mukuro still has her plans, no longer just ideas of them, and she knows she’ll have to go through with it soon. They won’t wait forever. 

 

She gets a chance when summer rolls around once again, and their parents ship them all off to Europe in a desperate attempt to resolve their quickly crumbling marriage (crumbling because of her, crumbling because she was lonely and awkward and no one would ever love her, crumbling while Junko would stay, yes she needed Junko). Junko seemed bored. Junko always seemed bored. It was the summer before they were supposed to enter middle school. They went to France, and had planned on circling around Europe for the rest of their trip, going to various beautiful places.

 

Mukuro, however, had only one location on her mind. 

 

Fenrir. 

 

It was far too easy to slip out silently into the night, her quiet footsteps fast against the winding pavement. She’d made it to the informant, and was already halfway to where she wanted to be, by the time her family even noticed that she wasn’t there. 

 

It was bliss, and pure relief, to finally have a purpose that didn’t revolve around Junko. It was a weight off of Mukuro’s shoulders. They all thought she had been kidnapped again, except for Junko, who would think she’d finally taken her advice to go jump off a bridge she was so ugly and stupid stupid  _ stupid _ .

 

But she hadn’t. She was with Fenrir. She was with the people she could relate to. She was with the people who had given her the name she lived by for the rest of her life, completely forgetting the one she had been referred to as before. She breezed through training, finished it early really, and went through like a dream. She still remembers the sting of getting her tattoo, choosing a place where it’d always be displayed to others, even off the battlefield, and remembers how wide her hidden smile had been as she was getting it etched into her skin. She learned so much about the combat she loved. She learned so much about the weapons she loved and would learn to love. She was the top of her class, and was shipped off to her first battle within three months. It was easy to her, and it came easy, existing in a war zone. 

 

People back home, who’d never seen a day of combat, would call war a drug. And it was, but not for the reasons people seemed to assume. Mukuro didn’t love to see people suffer, to see civilians crushed under the situations around them as they desperately clung to a way to survive when both sides garnered no sympathy. Mukuro, and all her peers and officers, didn’t enjoy the taste of iron, or the way their hands felt like they pushed a shopping cart through a parking lot after they fired a bullet. None of them liked it. What they did like, however, was how simple life became. 

 

There was an odd allure to military life. You got good pay, for one, but that was merely the draw in. The thing that kept you, held you in the life of a soldier forever, was the drive it gave you. You followed orders, you did them, you only existed to survive another day and tear down the other side. You didn’t pay taxes, or debate politics about people’s lives, or endure an awkward family dinner, or suffer through abuse at home or school or anywhere. You just lived to survive. 

 

Mukuro loved her peers here, and loved her officers. They all understood each other in a way that she wasn’t sure anyone else could, even Junko. They were kind people, who while stern, were still compassionate. They all did what they did to survive and win, come back alive, get paid, and then do it all over again. 

 

Mukuro, out of all of them, was without a doubt the best. 

 

That was a blessing and a curse. She watched her squadmates, her officers, everyone, all die and eventually be replaced. She rose through the ranks quickly, but only because she was the only one who was still alive. She was quick to learn how to keep everyone else alive, however, teach them how to survive on their own, and how to find their ways back. She had no idea how to formulate a plan. It was always actions first, thoughts later. There were always more casualties than there were victories. For the most part, she kept it about half and half, at least, and that was somehow more than what anyone could do. 

 

Fenrir was a professional mercenary group, who trained and provided the resources needed for their elite soldiers to go in and win wars for people. Fenrir was ruthless and unforgiving. But Fenrir was made up of people. Eventually Fenrir would give her different jobs, away from their main cash cow in the Middle East. She would get bigger and bigger jobs from them. Assassinations, genocides, anything they needed really, she was their jack of all trades. 

 

She was reluctant, however, when they sent her to Japan to slaughter middle-schoolers. 

 

It wasn’t just that it was in her home country, it was the prospect of murdering children for profit. She would’ve been one of them had she not abandoned her family in France. She would’ve been one of the squealing children underneath her heel, throats being crushed and crunching under her foot. She never let one of them get away, running away screaming. 

 

She never let one of them get away, until now. 

 

Two boys had hidden in the lockers. If she really looked, she could lock eyes with at least one of them. One was filled with terror and horror, and the other…

 

The other was filled with something that Mukuro felt was all too familiar. It struck her, and it struck her hard, but she did her best to keep her mannerisms under control. He was looking at her intently, his eyes bore into hers, intense and scorching. It almost made her blush. Because it was close to the way her father would look at her mother from across the dining table when she would say something particularly provocative she shouldn’t have been saying in front of her children at all. It was close to the glint in Junko’s eyes when she’d throw a dead animal at Mukuro and run off cackling while Mukuro would look down at its tiny body horrified. It was close to the way Mukuro’s own eyes would look in the heat of battle, going into a frenzy and not acknowledging anything else except her own steady breathing and the mental tally she made of the lives lost by her hand. She can feel heat rising up her neck at his stare.

 

Which is why she turns away quickly and leaves, following the echoes of screams to other rooms to finish her job. Two lives getting away wouldn’t be too bad, would it? No. It wouldn’t. Two lives was fine. The employer that contacted Fenrir had merely asked for at least a third of the students deaths, two lives getting away was fine. Just two. She doesn’t know who the two hiding in the lockers are, but she doesn’t feel it matters much, when she goes back to that same frenzy she needed to get the job done correctly. 

 

(Later one, while sitting in civilian clothing at a cafe, she watches the news hit. Their names are Shuji Fujigawa and Takumi Hijirihara. She almost wants to pay them a visit, just to see the way Takumi’s eyes had dug into her like they had back then. It was confusing and terrifying in the moment, but Mukuro will always somehow be called back to it, with an odd fondness that spreads from her chest to her stomach to her neck to her face to the tips of her fingers. She finds the memory intoxicating, but herself foolish for romanticizing it as much as she did. She couldn’t help but want to feel wanted.)

 

Her existence in Japan sets off a horrible chain of events, however, and somehow she finds herself in Junko’s clutches once again. 

 

After leaving a quaint little cafe she had stopped in to eat brunch at, dropping off a grenade as a gift to demolish the security cameras footage of her, she finds a note in her bag. She doesn’t know who it’s from until she reads the scratchy overly-cutesy text. She grips it hard, and the tears spring from her eyes. It’s her sister. Of course it’s her sister. It’s with a new name, a different name, a Junko Enoshima name, but it’s still her sister, through and through. 

 

Mukuro accepts her enrollment into Hopes Peak Academy as the Ultimate Soldier. Mukuro accepts her role as Junko’s puppet and toy, and slips easily back into plastering herself next to her sister, slips easily back into the mundanity of doing whatever she says and enduring the abuse because its Junko. It’s her sister, the person who only had Mukuro who could possibly understand her. 

 

Everything about that year is a blur of blindly following Junko, except for where Makoto is involved. 

 

On her first day she had caught his eye for some reason, and he had smiled at her, a genuine, kind one, that had her glued to the spot in a split second. It was soft and kind and genuine and real, it knocked the wind out of her and left her breathless as she stared into his sparkling eyes. Heat rose up to her face, much like that day at Giboura Middle School, and she gave a very small, very tentative, smile back at him. He seemed happy at this, and was making his way over to her until Junko yanked Mukuro’s arm hard to the side, and Mukuro lost his face, swapped out for the flowing following Junko’s commands. 

 

Still, that smile, it followed her. 

 

It followed her throughout the school year, with only glimpses of it hitting her in passing moments. Makoto was a popular boy, and everyone loved him whether they admitted to it or not. It was hard to hate him, because he was sweet and honest and earnest, with such love for the world inside his eyes. Mukuro wanted to protect it. 

 

She wanted to protect it from Sayaka Maizono, who held something recognizably sharp in everything she did that somehow no one but Mukuro and Junko had noticed. She wanted to protect it from Junko herself, who somehow found a way to hate Makoto and his softness, his concern, his care. She wanted to protect it from herself, who she knew would somehow only ruin it if she got too close. She settled for looking on longingly from afar, transparent in it, and everyone could notice. Yet he still remained oblivious, and Mukuro found that a great relief. 

 

It hurt her badly to watch his memories get erased, begging and pleading Junko not to do this, begging Mukuro herself to help him, please help him, help him, help him, don’t let her do this to him Mukuro, help him, help him, help him help him help him help him help him

 

But she doesn’t help him because she’s crying in a corner like a coward while Junko mocks the both of them for being weak and ugly and stupid stupid  _ stupid _ .

 

And that’s exactly what she is, she can concede, as the spears slide painfully out of her body and she hits the ground with a wet smack. 

 

She was weak. 

 

And ugly. 

  
And stupid stupid  _ stupid _ .

**Author's Note:**

> my hands hurt
> 
> also if you like this feel free to suggest who i should write extensive backstory on next  
> i'll do any dangan ronpa character, like, any kind  
> i've read all the lights novels and short stories and seen all the anime  
> like go for it man


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